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On December 22, 1938, Captain Hendrik Goosen caught an unusual fish of the coast of South Africa. He took it straight to port to local museum official and amateur scientist Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who recognized it as an extremely unusual creature and sought to identify it. Unable to locate anyone that day and facing the decomposition of the fish she had it stuffed and mounted. It wasn’t until the following February that a local university professor saw it and recognized its importance, naming the species after Latimer and the location it was found, the Chalumna River. The Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) is a type of lobe finned fish that first discovered (and is present in the fossil record) over 400 million years ago. The name coelacanth was given by the great Swiss paleontologist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) and comes from the Ancient Greek word κοῖλ-ος (koilos) meaning hollow and ἄκανθ-α (akantha) meaning spine-the coelacanth has a very unusual central nervous system. The coelacanth was thought to have gone extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. The coelacanth became the defining member (and still most famous member) of a class known as the Lazarus Taxon, species that disappear from the fossil record and are thought to be extinct only to be discovered after their period of supposed extinction.

The Coelacanth that evolutionists claim as a transitional form is living in the seas as a perfect life form. Fossils of living things such as the Cœlacanth, which evolutionists heralded as an extinct transitional life form but which has been realized to be still alive today as a bottom-dwelling fish, paint a striking picture that refutes the theory of evolution’s scenario of change.